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Architects: Charles Rose Architects
Location: Greenfield, MA, USA
Project Year: 2012
Project Area: 24,000 sqm
Photographs: Peter Vanderwarker

The John W. Olver Transit Center is designed to generate through renewable sources all the energy that it uses, meaning its net-energy consumption over the course of a year will be zero. At its core, the building contains a number of seemingly contradictory impulses.

Charles Rose Architects was mindful of citizens’ desires for a building that linked to Greenfield’s history and was a highly innovative carbon-neutral building, which our ARRA stimulus funding allowed us to do. The materials we chose for the exterior—brick, copper and locally sourced stone—are a respectful nod to the downtown business district and its stately dark-brick buildings.

Yet the transit center represents a radical departure from those energy-guzzling structures, anticipating the future and President Obama’s executive order requiring that all new federal buildings achieve net-zero by 2030. The dark brick cladding the western side may pay homage to Greenfield’s past, but its main purpose is green: a high-tech strategy in managing the building’s exposure to afternoon sun. In parts, the brick dissolves and the façade becomes a kind of skein; these patterns are computer-generated and control the amount of heat entering the building’s interior in summer and winter.

And while brick and stone imbue the center with a rooted-in-place quality, the building’s form conveys a sense of fluidity—a visual cue of the building’s purpose. Our design bends the building toward the northern end, which gives the center a sense of motion or perhaps a current running through the structure. If successful, it will generate currents of change: local officials are looking to the transit center to spark downtown revitalization and sustainable development.

Franklin Regional Transit Center / Charles Rose Architects originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 13 Oct 2012.

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Architects: Johnsen Schmaling Architects
Location: Greenfield, Wisconsin, United States
Project Year: 2011
Project Area: 200 sq ft
Photographs: John J. Macaulay

A small architectural intervention embedded in the spatial vacuum of suburbia, the Layton Pavilion functions as a gatehouse connecting a large strip mall parking lot and a walled-in, undevelopable brownfield site used as a provisional public green space along a busy suburban intersection. Working with a limited stipend, we designed a simple cast-in-place concrete pavilion, a skim-coated apron that hovers over the southwest corner of the brownfield site and marks the link between the two spaces. The crisp, austere form, its unapologetic blackness a stark contrast to the beige cheerfulness of its surroundings, creates an unexpected sense of gravitas in the weightless monotony of the suburban landscape.

Surrounded by an abundance of aesthetic timidity and literally leading from nowhere to nowhere, the pavilion itself becomes the destination, a reinterpretation of the archetypal folly in the park that offers a series of basic visceral and corporeal experiences rarely found in this context: the sudden spatial compression when entering; the controlled framing of views and vistas, through slits, walls, and roof; an occupiable object carefully scaled to be encountered by walking people, not speeding cars; the polished concrete planes, their tangible solidity and material authenticity a peculiar exception in an environment dominated by the antiseptic shallowness of thin veneers. The linear raingarden located below the roof edge allows stormwater to percolate into the ground, its native prairie grasses a welcome reprieve from the surrounding sea of asphalt.

Spatiality, scale, materiality – the Layton Pavilion reintroduces these fundamental concepts to the experientially impoverished realm of the urban periphery. Empty and ominous as it sits in the middle of the suburban void, it serves as a quiet monument to the richness of the human condition.